Stories

Category: Writing

  • Hot fudge sundae

    Hot fudge sundae

    Through their research on informal and incidental learning in the workplace, Karen Watkins and Victoria Marsick have produced one of the strongest evidence-based framework on how to strengthen learning culture to drive performance.

    Here, Karen Watkins shares an anecdote from a study of learning culture in which two teams from the same company both engaged in efforts to reward creative and innovative ideas and projects. However, one team generated far more ideas than the other. You won’t believe what turned out to be the cause of the drastically disparate outcomes.

     

    I recorded Karen via Skype while she was helping me to perform my first learning practice audit, a mixed methods diagnostic that can provide an organization with new, practical ways to recognize, foster, and augment the learning that matters the most.

    Recognizing that the majority of learning, problem-solving, idea generation, and innovation do not happen in the training room – physical or digital–, is a key step in our approach to help organizations execute change.

    Karen is a founding Trustee of the Geneva Learning Foundation.

  • Zapnito advisor insight: Reda Sadki’s story

    I spoke to Zapnito about why I became an advisor, my background and more…

    Please tell us a little bit about yourself

    My name is Reda Sadki, born and based in Geneva, Switzerland. I came to education from publishing, confronted with the challenge of how to harness the digital transformation to help meet the learning needs of 17.1 million Red Cross volunteers in 190 countries. 

    I could see and feel the changing landscape of education, with the hype of MOOCs as a tangible harbinger of the next wave: the fusion of machine learning, neuroscience, and life sciences (think CRISPR) to augment how we learn and help expand what it means to be human. I saw that existing organisations, mired with the legacy of training, needed a catalyst to embrace such changes. 

    Today, I lead The Geneva Learning Foundation, a non-profit with the mission to foster learning innovation to help us meet the humanitarian, global health, and development challenges that threaten our future. The Foundation’s focus is on R&D, trying new ways of doing new things. The other half of my time is spent building Learning Strategies International (LSi.io), a startup based at EPFL’s Swiss EdTech Collider. LSi is betting on ‘wetware’ – human beings with incredible talent and experience – to help organisations find their way through the Digital Transformation.

    How did you end up becoming a Zapnito advisor?

    Charles [Thiede, Zapnito CEO] just had to ask. I believe in the value of sharing experience and networks: that is how we grow. I first came across Zapnito while working with the OECD and was impressed with the simplicity and efficacy of its product. 

    Organisations that work with the imperative of profit are interesting to me, because of how different and similar their logic is compared to that of non-profits. There is something to be gained from any profit-driven business, no matter the size, whether it’s Zapnito or Google (worked with them too, a while back). 

    My know-how is in how to take a strategy problem that is complex, distributed, and global and build an incredibly effective experience that will involve not just staff but customers, helping each of them make sense of their own context while strengthening their connection to others, delivering not just performance but mindfulness, building key analytical and reflective capabilities to navigate the knowledge landscape.

    Having a good knowledge system like Zapnito is a cornerstone to building such experiences.

    Why is Zapnito necessary and important today?

    I have written about the autopsy of knowledge management and my belief that ‘KM’ is a dead-end when trying to grapple with knowledge. [Read Reda’s insights on the the death of the knowledge bank here and here.] 

    Companies selling KM have over complicated the issue. There is so much rubble left over from past failures of KM driven by IT teams obsessed with putting pieces of information into pigeonholes. That failed because knowledge is a process not a product, and its half-life constantly diminishes. 

    To me, what Zapnito has done is to clear the rubble leaving only what an organisation actually needs in order to have its capabilities in the production of expert knowledge recognised, in the right place and at the right time. Any organisation needs this capability so that expertise can be harnessed into routines that confer decision options.

    How do you see Zapnito’s business developing in the next 5 years?

    Zapnito makes me think of Auttomatic, the company behind WordPress. Zapnito has a unique, syncretic synthesis of talent and technology to scale craftsmanship. How you do that is a 21st century business challenge. Think mass production of highly-complex hardware like smart phones and how even the Big Five can stumble and fall (Amazon’s Fire phone or Google’s Pixel…). 

    Every Zapnito instance can be a carefully-crafted labor of love that is uniquely carved (not just tailored) to its environment no matter how many instances there are in the world. And, unlike WordPress, none of them will be ugly. 

    What in your opinion/experience is the single-most important skill in running a successful start-up?

    A good question. The most important skill is your ability to diagnose and fill the gaps in your own capabilities as a leader, at any point in time, by connecting to the right talent and technology.

    What has been the biggest lesson you have learnt in your career to date?

    You can have all the right ingredients but making the perfect dish at the right time is not certain. It is a constant struggle of learning and labour. Sure, you need a compelling vision and great talent to execute on that vision but that is no longer sufficient to guarantee success. In large Fortune 500 companies, there is a restructuring every seven months, on the average. It is not just the fast pace of change, it is the acceleration of it. How do you navigate the unknown? How do you build the capabilities that will let you prepare for what you are not expecting? That is now what it is about.

    And what is your main career goal for the next 5 years?

    Sorry, I think in terms of mission, not career. I have had the enormous privilege of working only on solving problems that matter for humanity. 

    In a society where the nature of knowledge is changing, where we accumulate information but know less and less, I have two convictions that drive me. The first conviction is that learning is the key process to help us navigate and shape our future. I discovered this working on what Ben Ramalingam calls the ‘edge of chaos’, where humanitarians face disasters, war, epidemics, and more, when failure usually means that people will die. My second conviction is that what works on the edge can also be useful to other organisations – including companies whose mission is to make money –  trying to survive and thrive in these changing times. I would like to share our R&D and expertise with others working to help organisations solve knowledge and learning problems, such as Zapnito. 

    If you could advocate one company to the world (aside from Zapnito & your own), what would it be and why?

    I would look for the most improbable startup in the most unlikely place. The next big things are going to come from the periphery, not the centre. If Facebook hadn’t bought it, WhatsApp would be an example of that: it solved a bandwidth problem for people in developing countries and moved to everywhere. It is our responsibility to seek out and nurture new leaders who may not resemble us but who are part of our shared future. 

    Everyone has a brilliant app idea. What’s yours?

    The app that frees us from all other apps. An AI app that can do more than find knowledge, but empower each of us to become a knowledge producer, in a global network of knowledge producers.

    If you had £1 billion and had to invest it in only one of the following three, which would it be and why? 1. Virtual Reality, 2. Artificial Intelligence, 3. Renewable Energy

    AI. I don’t see an end to the possibilities of AI. It is key to the 2nd Machine Age, what some have called the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’. At the AI for Good Summit organised by the United Nations, there was a session about AI for education. No one had a clue. That is in itself a signal that the implications and impact are likely to be profound. 

  • Make a wish

    Make a wish

    Is the CLO really the ‘fifth wheel’ in the organizational strategy wagon? Learning leaders tend to roll their eyes upward in sour-faced agreement about ending up as an after thought – after strategic alignment has been completed everywhere else in the organization, or being considered as a support service to enable and implement rather than a partner. So, what to wish for?

    First, I would wish for an organization that is mission-driven. This is what everyone wishes for, of course, so let me try to be specific. The mission should inspire, giving everyone something to strive for, to encourage people and structure to reinvent themselves to face global complexity – with clarity that reinvention is a constant, not a one-off. It would require strong leadership, not command-and-control, but modelling the values and practices of the organization and the acceptance that uncertainty requires calculated risk-taking, now and tomorrow. Such distributed leadership requires a strong, vocal chief executive attuned to the hyper-connected, perception-driven world we live, and can be brought to life only by a talent and learning team that excels at hiring, developing and retaining people who don’t fit traditional profiles, who recognize misfits as potential superheroes. The people function needs to be fast – keep a potential candidate waiting for months, and she’s gone.

    So, what does such a profile look like? We all recognize that most of the learning that matters is embedded into work… and then go back to organizing workshops, building online courses, and demanding resources so that people can stop their work, go off and study. Therefore, unless she is a digital native, our L&D misfit cum superhero sidekick may have to unlearn her own vestigial L&D workshop and training culture and its overemphasis on formal training  – and figure out how the lead the organization through that same process. How? Like an anthropologist, she should be able to unpack, read, and decipher the organization’s learning culture, invent new ideas to capture and share informal and tacit learning, and engineer embedded, adaptive systems to institutionalize these ideas. Immerse, observe, and learn to connect the dots between learning culture, strategy, and mission, knowing that culture drives performance.  Through this process, iterate ideas, experiments, and pilots, and do it fast enough and often enough to collapse the distinction between ‘stuff you try’ and operations – stretching the organization’s knowledge performance a little more each time. Think in the yoga of organizational development: stretch and stretch, but accept that you won’t get there the first time. Accept what is ‘good enough’, knowing that you get to try again, and that what is perfect now would not be so tomorrow, anyway. This circles back to leadership for learning – with the learning leader as sidekick, depending on the vision and the will of the chief executive to bring such a vision to life.

    The mantra is to maximize efficiency and effectiveness to become a strategic business partner. On efficiency, technology’s economy of effort removes the necessity of distinguishing between internal staff development and the needs of your external audiences (customers). This is key to working frugally with minimal human and financial resources. However, the organization should be skeptical of claims that efficiency or scale trumps effectiveness. Witness the slow agony of the LMS, the massively profitable industry of clunky content containers that require massive investment but depend on transmissive, behaviorist pedagogical models of the past, fail even at the purpose of compliance for which they are designed, and seldom deliver tangible knowledge or performance outcomes.

    I believe that it is reasonable to proclaim that in our knowledge-based economy, an organization’s ability to learn is key to both its survival and growth. However, this raises expectations about the relevance of the learning function, its outcomes and return on investment. And yet, even with perfect alignment, we are adding small, single-digit percentage points to performance and business results that, in many contexts, will not be measurable at the time when they matter most, if ever. Here is how Doug Lynch sums it up:

    The news isn’t all bad. The theory of human capital development suggests that if we develop people, they will become more productive. The problem is, empirical research suggests between 66 and 80 percent of the variance in performance is not captured by human capital development models. At best, we are able to impact 34 percent of the performance variance. And yet, the space seems to operate like learning is an elixir, curing any ill.

    The elixir fallacy results in part from our own legitimate search for relevance, alignment, and results. At the end of the day, you will be asked to “land it”, to demonstrate with fireworks and marching band how learning altered the organization’s DNA and made a difference. But what if that takes time, and looks more like a process of grains of sand washing up on the beach rather than a maelstrom of disruption? What if the part of L&D practice that matters is really, as Karen Watkins calls it, the “little R&D”, the unimpressive, slow-and-gradual process of trying new things, experimenting, getting it wrong and then right…?

    So, the last item on my wish list is for an organization that acknowledges that strengthening learning culture requires a mixed methods approach, alternating  between slow, gradual change-over-time that leverages smart technology and pedagogy that can impact everyone in the organization with shock-and-awe leadership and high-potential development, action learning, wicked problem solving, innovation tournaments, and other highly visible acts of disruption to shake up business as usual.

    Photo: Speaking of effigies (Dayna Bateman/Flickr).

  • Unified Knowledge Universe

    Unified Knowledge Universe

    “Knowledge is the economy. What used to be the means has today become the end. Knowledge is a river, not a reservoir. A process, not a product. It’s the pipes that matter, because learning is in the network.” – George Siemens  in Knowing Knowledge (2006)

    Harnessing the proliferation of knowledge systems and the rapid pace of technological change is a key problem for 21st century organizations. When knowledge is more of a deluge than a trickle, old command-control methods of creating, controlling, and distributing knowledge encased in a container view do little to crack how we can tame this flood. How do you scaffold continual improvement in learning and knowledge production to maximize depth, dissemination and impact? A new approach is needed to apply multiple lenses to a specific organizational context.

    What the organization wants to enable, improve and accelerate:

    1. Give decision makers instant, ubiquitous and predictive access to all the knowledge in its universe – and connect it to everywhere.
    2. Rapidly curate, collate and circulate most-current content as a publication (print on demand, ebooks, etc.) when it is thick knowledge, and for everything else as a set of web pages (micro-site or blog), or individual, granular bits of content suitable for embed anywhere.
    3. Accelerate co-construction of new, most-current knowledge using peer review to deliver high-quality case studies, strategies, implementation plans, etc.

    How do you crack this? Here are some of the steps:

    1. Benchmark existing knowledge production workflows and identify bottlenecks, using multiple lenses and mixed methods.
    2. In the short term, fix publishing bottlenecks by improving existing systems (software) and performance support (people).
    3. In the longer view, adopt a total quality management (TQM) approach to build ‘scaffolding’ and ‘pipes’ that maximize production, capture, flow, and impact of high-quality, most-current knowledge production, with everything replicated in a centralized, unstructured repository.

    Multiple lenses are needed as no single way of seeing can unravel the complexity of knowledge flows:

    • The lens of complexity: Systems thinking recognizes that we do not need a full understanding of the constituent objects in order to benchmark, analyze, or make decisions to improve processes, outcomes, and quality.
    • The lens of learning: Learning theory provides the framework to map knowledge flows beyond production to dissemination to impact. The co-construction of knowledge provides a ‘deeper’, less fleeting perspective than conventional social media approaches. More pragmatically, a number of tools from learning and development and education research can be used to benchmark.
    • The lens of talent: Staff lose precious time and experience frustration due to duplication of effort, repetitive tasks, and anxiety due to the risk of errors. They may feel overwhelmed by the complexity and intricacies of multiple systems, as well as by the requirement to learn and adapt to each one. Informal learning communities can bring together in the workflow to identify potential, develop competencies, and drive performance. Hiring, on boarding and handover can be used to identify gaps and improve fitness for purpose.
    • The lens of culture: Determinants of quality through print-centric publishing processes are grounded in a rich cultural legacy, for example. Other specialists (IT, comms, etc.) also have their own, overlapping universes. Correct analysis of these and how they interact is indispensable.
    • The lens of total quality management (TQM): This lens includes quality development, business process improvement (BPI), and risk management. It can help both in the initial diagnosis (process maps) and in designing systems and procedures for continual improvement.
    • The lens of IT: Information technology management includes both agile methods as well as traditional requirements-and-specifications. Although such approaches on their own are unlikely to achieve the desired outcomes, their familiarity may facilitate acceptance and usage of the other lenses.

    The remaining pieces of the puzzle involve standards, mixed methods, and deliverables.

    Unified Knowledge Universe
    Unified Knowledge Universe

    Photo: Lenses rainbow (csaveanu/flickr).

  • Vanishing point

    Vanishing point

    Two parallel lines look like they eventually converge at the horizon. Technology’s chase for digital convergence, say between television and the Internet, raises interesting questions of its own, starting with what happens at the ‘vanishing point’ – and how to get there. How about publishing and learning? Semantico has a blog post based on John Helmer’s lively chat with Toby Green, OECD’s head of publishing, and myself.

    Yes, publishing has already been transformed by the amazing economy of effort of technology. Now it is struggling to find meaning in the throes of the changing nature of knowledge (as it’s locked in, so to speak, by its container view of knowledge). In the past, an ‘educational’ publisher was a specific breed and brand. In the hyper-connected present, where knowledge is a process (not a product), publishers who have already transformed themselves at least once (that is, they are still around) now have to consider how to maximize both dissemination and impact. This is where education (the science of how we come to know) is most needed.

    For international mission-driven organizations, learning, education, training, and publishing are often split functions. (I haven’t included knowledge management, having declared its timely demise elsewhere). They may or may not be centralized, organized, or measured. Some – but not all– may still be operating on old models (face-to-face training to drive performance or manual layout to prepare publications) or in the midst of their respective digital migrations.

    Talking convergence is really about starting at the vanishing point, and working back to the present. I am now convinced that, although each function holds its own values (and value), the lens of education is the most powerful and significant one – and the one most likely to drive strategy in a knowledge-based organization.

    Convergence and cross-fertilisation: Semantico talks to Toby Green and Reda Sadki about publishers and learning

    Photo: Pietro Perugino’s usage of perspective in the Delivery of the Keys fresco at the Sistine Chapel (1481–82) helped bring the Renaissance to Rome.

  • Scaling up critical thinking against extreme poverty

    Scaling up critical thinking against extreme poverty

    In three years, the World Bank’s e-Institute enrolled 50,000 learners through small, tutor-led online courses and webinars. Its first MOOC, run on Coursera’s platform for four weeks, reached 19,500. More MOOCs are in preparation, with the next one, based on the flagship World Development Report, launching on June 30th (details here). However, the need for scale is only one consideration in a comprehensive strategic vision of how learning innovation in all its forms can be harnessed to foster new kinds of leadership and accelerate development.

    In this candid conversation recorded at the Scaling corporate learning online symposium, I asked Abha Joshi-Ghani, the World Bank’s Director for Knowledge Exchange and Learning, to present some early data points from the Bank’s first MOOC, situating it within a broader history of engagement in distance and online learning. Joshi-Ghani describes the partnership, business and production models for its pilot MOOC. She also shares some early insights about the learner experience, completion rates (40%), and demographics (40% from developing countries).

    Listen to the conversation with Abha Joshi-Ghani

     

    As the Bank engages in what the Washington Post has called its “first massive reorganization in nearly two decades” to focus on ending extreme poverty by 2030,  the role of knowledge in such a process should be a strategic question. In the past, the reorganization of knowledge production was a key process in creating “new possibilities of power” to determine “what could be said, thought, imagined”, defining a “perceptual domain, the space of development” (Escobar 1992:24). Harnessing knowledge flows in a VUCA world requires an open, agile approach that recognizes the changing nature of knowledge: its diminishing half-life and corollary acceleration, its location in the network. This is what I found most compelling about Abha Joshi-Ghani’s brief presentation of the new Open Learning Campus, which opens a path for the World Bank to become the first international organization to organize its learning strategy around knowledge as a networked, complex process (Siemens 2006:34) . To do so is the twenty-first century way to support critical or analytical thinking that “lies at the heart of any transformative process”, aligned closely with Paulo Freire’s ‘conscientisation’ (Foley 2008:775).

    Photo: City view of Beirut, Lebanon on June 1, 2014 (Dominic Chavez/World Bank).

    Foley, C., 2008. Developing critical thinking in NGO field staff. Development in Practice 18, 774–778. https://doi.org/10.1080/09614520802386827

    Escobar, A., 1992. Imagining a post-development era. Social Text, Third World and Post-Colonial Issues 20–56.

    Siemens, G., 2006. Knowing knowledge.

     

  • Opening workplace learning

    Opening workplace learning

    For organizations, the paradigm of workplace learning remains focused on internal development of staff, on the premise that staff need to be learning to improve, if only to keep their knowledge and competencies current.

    In the past, education advocates struggled to gain recognition for the need to continually learn in the workplace. Opening workplace learning was difficult to justify or finance due to the economy of effort required to deploy educational activities.

    In today’s hyper-connected world, organizations can no longer afford to restrict their educational activities to their own staff. Nor can they rationally allow for such activities to be limited to ad hoc face-to-face ‘trainings’ that do not scale. They need to reach their target audiences through education if they want the knowledge they produce to have more than superficial impact.

    This is part and parcel of sustainability. Closed learning restricted to the workplace is the knowledge economy equivalent of strip-mining.

    Photo: Opencast Mine, Germany (TablinumCarlson/Flickr).

  • Bill Gates on education, MOOCs, poverty and disease

    Bill Gates on education, MOOCs, poverty and disease

    This quote is not new. Given the increasing focus of MOOC debates on corporate MOOCs, it is interesting because bridging gaps in knowledge and skills is needed to address global health and poverty gaps. However, these twin strands of the Gates Foundation have, so far, been led by separate teams.

  • Back to London on Thursday to talk learning strategy for humanitarian and development organizations

    Back to London on Thursday to talk learning strategy for humanitarian and development organizations

    I’m looking forward to being back in London on Thursday 13 March for People In Aid’s Learning & Development network meeting.

    This group meets four times a year to discuss issues in which there is a shared interest across organizations. Previous topics have covered how to “measure” learning or the design of competency frameworks, for example. Recent projects presented at the meetings include Save The Children’s Humanitarian and Leadership Academy (a major project to scale up professionalization of the sector) or RedR’s competency framework for humanitarian training. Each meeting’s report is a short but often insightful summary around a project or theme, and can be found here.

    As for me, I’ll be sharing key insights from the European MOOC Stakeholders’ Summit as we try to figure out what these massive, open online courses might mean for the humanitarian and development sector. I’ll also share a couple of case studies documenting how online learning can be used to learn 21st century knowledge skills. The whole point is to think about how learning can go from being incidental to strategic.

    You can find out more about this event on LSi.io’s events page or from the People In Aid web site.

    Photo: Much scaffolding, King’s Cross Station, London (orangeaurochs/flickr.com).

  • Meet Barbara Moser-Mercer, the lady who did MOOCs in a refugee camp

    Meet Barbara Moser-Mercer, the lady who did MOOCs in a refugee camp

    I first heard her described as the “lady who did MOOCs in a refugee camp”. It was completely ambiguous what that meant, but certainly sparked my curiosity. Barbara Moser-Mercer is a professor at the University of Geneva and a  cognitive psychologist who has practiced and researched education in emergencies.

    I finally caught up with her at the Second European MOOC Summit.